Neurocognitive profiles in autism spectrum disorder

textThe current research project examines the performance of a group of high functioning young adult males with autism spectrum disorders on standardized measures of neurocognitive functioning to determine whether distinct cognitive profiles of strengths and weaknesses emerge. Neuropsychological test data across various domains: general cognitive ability, visuospatial processing, verbal learning and memory, visual learning and memory, working memory, reasoning, cognitive flexibility, attention, receptive language, expressive language, social and emotional processing, and fine motor skills was examined. Data were analyzed using cluster analysis to assess for the presence and nature of unique clusters/subgroups based on neuropsychological test performance. Three unique clusters were derived from the analyses. This study highlights the well-documented heterogeneity across the spectrum of autism and suggests a method for parsing a heterogeneous sample of ASD subjects into smaller and more meaningful homogeneous groups using standardized neuropsychological assessments.Educational Psycholog

Imagining Corporate Sustainability as a Public Good Rather than a Corporate Bad

Corporations have been criticized for their environmental misdeeds for over a century, so it is not surprising that many view corporate approaches to sustainability with skepticism. Reports of green-washing and other forms of misleading advertising by a handful of corporations only serve to reinforce this negative perception.The Kay Bailey Hutchison Center for Energy, Law, and Busines

De Viti de Marco vs. Ricardo on public debt: self-extinction or default?

The most prominent Italian theorist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Antonio de Viti de Marco, accepted David Ricardo’s proposition that an extraordinary tax and a public loan are equivalent. Despite this common point of analytical departure, their theories of public debt diverged sharply. In this divergence, moreover, lies a fundamental gulf between two distinct analytical schemes for connecting the micro and macro levels of analysis. Ricardo treated macro aggregates as analytical primitives, with individual action being induced from those aggregates. In sharp contrast, de Viti took individual variables as primitive, with aggregate conditions being induced from interaction among those individual variables. Within de Viti’s framework of a fully cooperative state, public debt would be self-extinguishing. De Viti also recognized that democracies were never exclusively cooperative, as continuing competition among elites striving for power would enable politically dominant groups to pass cost onto the remainder of society, thereby operating as a de facto form of default